REPORT | May 2020

REIMAGINING RIKERS ISLAND:

A Better Alternative to NYC’s
Four-Borough Jail Plan
Nicole Gelinas
Senior Fellow
 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan

About the Author

Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal,
and a columnist at the New York Post. She writes on urban economics and finance. Gelinas is
a CFA charterholder and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and
Washington (2011).

Gelinas has published analysis and opinion pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Before coming to City Journal, she was a business
journalist for Thomson Financial, where she covered the international syndicated-loan and private-
debt markets. Gelinas holds a B.A. in English literature from Tulane University.

2
 Contents
Executive Summary...................................................................4
The Borough-Based Jails Plan: A Brief Overview........................5
Financial Risks of the Jails Plan: At What Cost to the
City’s Capital Budget?...............................................................7
Construction Risks: Can the City Build the Jails on
Time and on Budget?................................................................7
Operational Risks: Would Borough-Based Jails
Solve Rikers’ Problems?............................................................8
The New Borough Jails: Transportation......................................9
Another Way: A Reimagined Rikers..........................................10
A Reimagined Rikers: Financial Benefits...................................12
A Reimagined Rikers: What About the Drawbacks?..................12
Conclusion..............................................................................13
Endnotes.................................................................................15

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 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan

Executive Summary
Six months before the Covid-19 epidemic spread across New York City in early March, Mayor Bill de Blasio and
the city council approved a plan to spend nearly $9 billion over the next half-decade to build four jails, one each
in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The completion of the new jails, in turn, would allow the city to
close Rikers Island, home to most existing jail facilities.
The mayor and the council are right in one respect: the jail facilities on Rikers are deficient. One way or another,
New York must invest billions to make good on its promise to treat detainees—most of whom have not yet been
convicted of any crime—with compassion and dignity.
But there are major flaws in the city’s plan. The construction of four new jails in dense urban neighborhoods, at
enormous expense and risk to the city’s fiscal health, does not guarantee inmates the better care that the city has
promised. By concentrating on location rather than on deeper-seated problems, the city may simply replicate
Rikers’ problems elsewhere. Indeed, should the city fail to successfully execute its borough-based jails plan, it
would even fall short of its ultimate, symbolic goal: closing Rikers.
The coronavirus crisis puts these flaws into sharper relief. At present, the city faces the loss of hundreds of
thousands of jobs, billions—if not tens of billions—in tax revenue, and significant uncertainty over when recovery
will begin and how strong it will be. As a result, New York simply has far less room for error than it did last fall,
when it approved its plan to build new jails.
There is a better alternative: rebuild Rikers. This 400-acre island is an optimal location for multiple, well-
designed, low- to mid-rise jail facilities. Rikers is also New York’s only remaining open space near enough to
the courthouses in all five boroughs to be a practical location for housing inmates in a sprawling setting—but
far away enough from the general population to serve as a secure location. Figure 1 is a sketch of what a rebuilt
Rikers Island might look like.
New York could turn Rikers’ fabled isolation into an advantage, rather than a disadvantage. The island’s geography
presents an opportunity to experiment with giving inmates more freedom and flexibility than they could hope to
experience in four new high-rise borough jails.

FIGURE 1.

Rikers Island,
Reimagined:
A Campus
Approach
to a Successful
21st-Century
Jail Complex
Source: Lin Sing Association

4
REIMAGINING RIKERS ISLAND:
A Better Alternative to NYC’s
Four-Borough Jail Plan
The Borough-Based Jails Plan: A Brief Overview
The ultimate goal of the new “borough-based jails plan,” according to the city, is “modern,” “humane” jails that
are “smaller, safer, and fairer.”1 Before Covid-19 spread, New York City’s jails, the majority of them on Rikers
Island, were the home, at any given time, to nearly 6,000 daily inmates.2 Most inmates are awaiting trial; that is,
they are charged with, but not convicted of, a crime, and they cannot make bail or are not eligible for bail.

Rikers has long been a symbol of poor incarceration practices. Many of the island’s collection of nine low-rise
jail facilities are outdated and poorly maintained. They lack basic provisions for personal hygiene and public
health, forcing inmates to share toilets, for example. They also lack modern temperature controls, endangering
the health and lives of inmates sensitive to heat or cold.3 Such public-health deficiencies are even more urgent in
the current pandemic, as corrections workers and inmates have tested positive for Covid-19. Indeed, the city has
released nearly one thousand older and unhealthy inmates to protect their health.4

There are other problems. Cells and hallways are noisy and smelly.5 Violence is prevalent: between 2008 and
2017, the city’s Department of Correction reported a doubling of inmate injuries, from 15,620 to 31,368, even as
the inmate population declined 32%.6 Deteriorating facilities and violence go together, as inmates are reported
to have chipped off pieces of the decaying infrastructure to create weapons. Visitors have a difficult time coming
to see inmates, as public transportation to the island is scarce. Once on the island, visitors must endure multiple
security checks and additional bus rides from a central intake area to each jail facility, requiring more waiting.

To address the many long-standing deficiencies of Rikers Island, the mayor and the city council, in October
2019, approved a plan to build four new jails across New York City by 2026.7 If all goes as planned, the city’s
jail population would have fallen by more than half, making jails “smaller.” A better design would discourage
violence, making jails “safer.” Jails would be located nearer to inmates’ homes, families, and friends, facilitating
easier visits. Jails would also be closer to courts, helping to speed up the process between arraignment and trial
outcome. The jails would offer outdoor space, natural sunlight, superior medical and mental-health care, and
education, thus making the jails “fairer.”

The basic specifications for each jail8 are as follows, although these deadlines are already subject to change as the
city grapples with its coronavirus response.9

5
 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan
N
Figure B-1 BBJ-M Location N

Figure B-4 BBJ-X Location

MANHATTAN THE BRONX

124–125 White Street, Lower Manhattan/ 745 East 141st Street,

Chinatown Mott Haven

Number of beds: 886 Number of beds: 886

Parking spaces: 125 (minimum) Parking spaces: 575 (minimum)
Building height: 295 feet (approximately 30 storeys, Building height: 195 feet (approximately 20 storeys,
not including up to 40 feet of mechanical facilities not including up to 40 feet of mechanical facilities)
such as power, heating, and cooling plant) Square feet: 787,000
Square feet: 698,000 Request for
Cost:Qualifications
$1.5–$1.8 Figure
billionB-5 BBJ-X Map Location
Cost: $1.5–$1.8 billion PIN: 8502020CR049P-60P
Deadlines: Winning bid to be announced
Deadlines: Winning bid to be announced Novemeber 2021, “substantial completion” by 2026 Reques
September 2021, “substantial completion” by 2026 PIN: 85
Figure B-2 BBJ-M Map Location
4 | RFQ - NYC Design-Build Borough-Based Jail Program – Detention Facilities (Ap

C Design-Build Borough-Based Jail Program – Detention Facilities (Appendix

BROOKLYN QUEENSC-1)

275 Atlantic Avenue 126-02 82nd Avenue, Kew Gardens

Number of beds: 886 Number of beds: 886

Parking spaces: 292 (minimum) Parking spaces: 605 (minimum)
Building height: 295 feet (approximately 30 storeys, Building height: 195 feet (approximately 20 storeys,
not including mechanical facilities) not including mechanical facilities)
Square feet: 712,000 Square feet: 765,000
Cost: TBD Cost: TBD
Deadlines: TBD Deadlines: TBD
Figure B-10 BBJ-Q Map Location

PROCUREMENT AND PROJECT SCHEDULE, PRELIMINARY BUDGET

Figure B-8 BBJ-K Map Location
6
STIPEND FOR THE QUEENS DETENTION FACILITY
Financial Risks of the
Jails Plan: At What Cost
to the City’s Capital
Budget?
Since mid-March, the state and city have mandated
public-health closures of entire swaths of the city’s
economy, including most retail, restaurant, and person-
al-services businesses. These closures will soon cause a
steep falloff in tax revenues, likely far worse than what
New York experienced after 9/11 or the 2007–08 fi-
nancial crisis. Safeguarding the city’s capital budget for
critical infrastructure that can support its fragile tax
base has thus become paramount. Building four new
jails, however, is the single biggest capital-construction
project that the city government has embarked upon in
more than a half-century—and the project is supposed
to be finished on an aggressive schedule of six and a
half years from mid-2020. The city estimates that the
four borough jails will cost $8.7 billion in total.10
Even if the city builds the jails on time and on budget,
$8.7 billion is a significant portion of the city’s 10-year
capital budget—that is, the city’s schedule for long-term
investments in infrastructure such as bridge repairs
and restorations, bus and bike lanes, sanitation facil-
ities, school buildings, and subsidized housing. Money
that goes to the four-borough jail program is money
that could have gone to other critical needs, including
rebuilding the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or repair-
ing the New York City Housing Authority properties.
A comparison between the mayor’s January 2019 cap-
ital-budget proposal for the next decade,11 which did
not include funding for the four borough jails, and the
mayor’s April 2019 proposal,12 which did include such
funding, illustrates this point. In January 2019, the
projected capital (infrastructure) budget for the city’s
justice system was $5.2 billion. By April, the justice
system’s projected capital budget was $13.7 billion,
driven by an increase in the corrections budget from
$1.8 billion to $10 billion. The justice system now ac-
counts for 12% of the overall $117 billion capital budget
over the next 10 years, up from 5%.
For as long as the city’s economy continued to grow,
committing $8.7 billion to borough jails did not cut the
total amount of money that the city has to pay for other
long-term needs. With the pandemic, the city must in-
evitably rethink its capital-budget priorities so that one
experimental project does not overwhelm the rest of
the scarcer money available for critical infrastructure.
Construction Risks: Can
the City Build the Jails on
Time and on Budget?
Overseeing the design and construction of four new
complex high-rise buildings in dense urban neighbor-
hoods simultaneously in little more than half a decade
is an extraordinary undertaking, especially for a city
government unaccustomed to overseeing projects of
such scope. It is also the city’s largest complex infra-
structure project in modern history.
The schedule is even more aggressive than originally
intended. In April 2019, the city moved the timeline
for the completion of the jails by one year, from 2027
to 2026, without explaining why the scope of the plan
supported such compression.13
New York’s underground Third Water Tunnel is the
closest rival to the jails plan. It costs $6 billion but
spans five decades.14 The Metropolitan Transporta-
tion Authority’s $11.1 billion East Side Access project
will bring Long Island Rail Road trains below Grand
Central Station. It is now a nearly two-decades-long
undertaking.15
The jails plan is similar in scope to the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey’s rebuilding of the World
Trade Center—also a project involving complex high-
rise buildings with specific security needs. It took well
more than a decade and cost $15 billion.16 The East Side
Access and World Trade Center projects, moreover,
encountered significant cost and schedule overruns,
despite their governing agencies’ greater experience in
managing large-scale infrastructure projects.
New York City’s government regularly oversees con-
tracts to rebuild roads and repair bridges, construct
schools, and build sanitation and environmental-pro-
tection facilities. But it has little experience in over-
seeing the design and construction of four complex
high-rise buildings in such a short time. As the city
puts it, the project involves “complex construction on
… severely constrained project site[s].”17 Each jail must
have a 100% reliable power source; three of the four
facilities must include secure bridges or tunnels to ad-
jacent or nearby court facilities in lower Manhattan,
central Brooklyn, and central Queens.
New York City’s Department of Design and Construc-
tion, which will oversee the jails plan, has no experience
in such a large-scale project and has performed poorly
on smaller projects. The department, for instance,
spent $41 million and a decade—well over the initial
7
 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan
$30 million budget and 2017 deadline—to build a
modest library in Queens’ Long Island City. Yet the
facility has been sued for violating the Americans
with Disabilities Act, the federal handicapped-acces-
sibility law.18
“Design-build,” the framework through which the city
will award contracts to build the four jails, theoretically
reduces the risk of cost overruns to city taxpayers by
holding winning bidders responsible for design and
construction, thus alleviating discrepancies between
the two. Yet in its initial bid documents, the city notes
to potential bidders that it will “mitigat[e] the risk
to the design-builder by providing for appropriate
allowances, potential economic price adjustment
provisions, and mitigating unknown subsurface
conditions.” Agreeing to shoulder the cost of
“economic price adjustment[s]” leaves the taxpayer
open to unknown cost overruns.
Three of the jails will require extensive work just to
prepare the sites. In Manhattan, the winning bidder
must first demolish two existing nine- and 11-storey
towers comprising more than half a million square feet.
The demolition, in turn, requires asbestos mitigation.
The Brooklyn and Queens sites require similar demoli-
tion and remediation. In the Bronx, the city must first
determine where to relocate the NYPD’s existing “tow
pound”—where hundreds of impounded vehicles are
kept—before a contractor can begin construction.
Legal uncertainty puts additional pressure on the city’s
already aggressive bidding and construction sched-
ule. Community groups in the Bronx, Manhattan, and
Queens,19 for example, have filed suits in state court
against the proposed jails for each of their respective
boroughs, claiming that the city did not follow the
proper procedure for approval of a change in land use.
Even short-term delays caused by these legal proceed-
ings will put additional pressure on the city to do more
work in a shorter time frame, thus pushing up costs as
contractors add extra shifts and overtime.
Operational Risks:
Would Borough-Based
Jails Solve Rikers’
Problems?
Even if the city completes the four jails on a reason-
able schedule and budget, it may not solve Rikers’ ex-
isting problems. Success depends, above all else, on the
city achieving a highly challenging feat: ensuring that
8
the inmate population does not exceed the facilities’
significantly reduced capacity. The city must reduce
inmate populations below today’s record-low levels, or
the jails will not function as designed. If the city cannot
reduce the jail population, operating close to, at, or
above capacity would imperil its ability to safeguard
inmates’ health.
As of late 2019, the average daily population in the
city’s jails was 7,365 inmates; by early 2020, the pop-
ulation had fallen to 5,721, the first time it had fallen
below 6,000 in decades. (In addition to Rikers, the city
has two smaller jails in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a
floating jail barge near the Bronx; all three would close
as part of the four-borough jail plan, and the inmates
would be transferred to the new facilities in Brooklyn
and Manhattan.)20 The four new jails will have a cu-
mulative capacity of just 3,544 beds.
The city arrived at this number politically. The mayor’s
office needed the city council member in each neigh-
borhood to vote for a new jail and had to repeatedly
reduce the number of beds to get each council member
to sign on.21 In 2017, however, when the city began
to explore reducing its jail capacity, the report that it
commissioned concluded “that it is possible to reduce
the jail population to less than 5,000 people over the
next decade.”22
But the city has never explained how it abruptly arrived
at a maximum figure of 3,544 inmates rather than
5,000. To keep inmates below this new capacity, the
city must reduce the current average daily number of
inmates to its projected goal of 3,300 inmates23 within
seven years, a 42% decrease.
New York City’s jail population has declined from a
high of nearly 22,000 inmates on an average day in
1991.24 And over the past seven years, from 2012 to
2019, the jail population declined by 45%. New York
today has a low rate of incarceration: 97 inmates per
100,000 adults, compared with 241 in Los Angeles and
450 in Philadelphia.25
Unless crime falls significantly from today’s near-
record-low levels, the city will have a difficult time
achieving its far more aggressive goal without
endangering public safety. Of the city’s mid-2019
average daily population in jail, 3,261 people were
there awaiting trial for a violent felony, and another
901 were serving a short sentence. Even under
pressure to allow nonviolent inmates to leave jail in
order to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus, New
York could come up with only 1,500 of candidates, not
thousands, leaving the population just below 4,000,
or above the planned capacity of the new jails, and
only by making dubious decisions such as releasing by public transit, rather than driving to and from a
an inmate awaiting trial for allegedly murdering his secured island.
girlfriend.26 Reducing the population, then, even to
today’s population of the most violent of the alleged The city also faces significant challenges in being able
offenders, and people already sentenced, would still to offer ample recreational, outdoor, therapeutic, and
leave the new jails above capacity.27 medical spaces within high-rise configurations. The ex-
isting Rikers Island jails offer supervised inmate access
If the city cannot safely reduce the inmate population to a modest outdoor farm. It will be hard to re-create
to match the capacity of its new jails, it will face two such an opportunity on the roof of a high-rise building,
unpalatable options: running overcrowded jails or especially with security and power needs competing for
keeping obsolete facilities on Rikers open. Overcrowd- space on that roof.
ed jails would endanger the city’s stated goal of creating
a more humane environment; it would, for example,
endanger the city’s goal to reduce violence among
inmates. In short, falling back on Rikers in 2026 would The New Borough Jails:
represent a failure to deliver on its multibillion-dollar
promise. Yet the city has quietly left itself this option; Transportation
the city council has not yet rezoned Rikers to prohibit
jails there.28 Rikers Island has two transportation problems:
moving inmates to and from court; and encourag-
There are other operational risks to the promises that ing family members and friends to visit inmates.
the new high-rise jails will be safer and fairer. For Four-borough jails do not automatically solve either
instance, the government has never explained how it of these problems.
would evacuate hundreds of inmates onto crowded New
York City streets in a fire or other emergency. As for the One motive behind the four-borough jail plan is to
danger that inmates pose to one another (and to guards): locate jails nearer courts, ensuring easier travel time
though the city has projected operational savings from from Rikers to the rest of the criminal-justice system.
its potential reduction in inmates, having to secure each The new Bronx jail, however, will be two miles from the
floor of a high-rise jail—rather than one large, open Bronx Criminal Court. At the other three jails, there is
space across a horizontal corridor—likely will require no guarantee that any given inmate will find himself
more corrections officers per inmate, not fewer. incarcerated near the court that is relevant to his case.
The four jails divide inmate capacity equally, but the
The city’s conception for new jails is that of small, distribution of inmates jailed before trial is not equal by
apartment-style housing units (one inmate per unit, borough. A recent survey of inmates found that 32.1%
with a private bathroom and shower) surrounding a of the average daily population had been arraigned in
common area on each floor, a big contrast from today’s Manhattan, for example. Only 15.1% were arraigned in
communal cells, where up to dozens of people can the Bronx (Figure 2).
share a toilet.29 Yet the city has never explained how
guards might respond quickly to a disturbance on any
one floor, or how guards might transport inmates by FIGURE 2.
elevator from one floor to another without the risk
that inmates might encounter fellow inmates from Borough of Arraignment, Average Daily
rival gangs. Even in modern jails, efforts at privacy Inmate Population, FY2019, Quarter 1
and dignity may require more supervision, not less. A
private bathroom and shower may be a noble goal, but
Number Percentage
a guard must be on hand to ensure that no inmate is
spending a potentially dangerous amount of time by Brooklyn 1,673 20.4
himself in such a private space. Bronx 1,235 15.1
Manhattan 2,631 32.1
In light of the problems revealed by the current
pandemic, New York must also consider the Staten Island 343 4.2
heightened public-health implications of dispersed Queens 1,389 16.9
jails in dense neighborhoods. Corrections officers Other 936 11.4
who interact with an institutional population that is,
by definition, at greater risk of infection would be Source: NYC Department of Correction, Population Demographics, FY2019 Quarter 1
going to and from work in populous areas, possibly

9
 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan
If the new jails operate at or above capacity, the unequal
distribution of inmates by borough will require the
transfer of some inmates to a jail not near the court-
house where their case will take place. If Manhattan
continues to detain a disproportionate number of
inmates, for example, inmates awaiting a court date
will have to await their trial in a Bronx or Queens jail.
(Inmates awaiting a Staten Island Court date will face
incarceration in the Brooklyn jail.)30
Dividing the inmate population equally by borough
ignores another issue: crime and incarceration rates
are not distributed equally by borough, nor do offend-
ers necessarily commit a crime in their home borough.
The Bronx, for example, has the highest incarceration
rate, proportionate to population, among the five bor-
oughs.31 An inmate from the Bronx who had alleged-
ly committed a crime in Brooklyn could find himself
detained in Queens, making it difficult for family and
friends to visit.
Another Way: A
Reimagined Rikers
As the city notes, its new jails must be a successful
example of an “enduring design that supports justice
reform for many decades to come.”32 In that spirit—
and before committing irrevocably to spending billions
of dollars in taxpayer money on a flawed plan—the
city council and mayor should pause the current bid
process and consider an alternative: rebuilding Rikers
as a modern jail.
To be sure, the city should demolish Rikers’ existing
jail buildings. But it can do so one by one, taking ad-
vantage of the fact that Rikers is at only 60% of its ca-
pacity. The city can rebuild a jail campus in place and
transfer inmates from old to new facilities as each new
facility opens, thus avoiding a high-pressure deadline.
By rebuilding Rikers, New York can avoid significant
risks posed by the borough jails plan:
• t he risk that the cost of four new jails will overwhelm
the rest of the city’s capital-investment priorities
after the coronavirus pandemic;
• the risk that the city cannot complete the project on
time, on budget, and to stated specifications; and
• the risk that the jails will not have enough capacity
for the inmate population.
10
Finally, New York can avoid the most significant risk of
all: that shortfalls in achieving the goals of the borough
jails would force the city to return to Rikers’ current
outdated, deficient buildings to house an overflow of
inmates. Indeed, as coronavirus hit Rikers, the city
was forced to reopen a previously shuttered jail on the
island to keep inmates spaced farther apart.33
Bill Bialosky, a New York City architect, suggests a
rough prototype. Working in collaboration with the Lin
Sing Association, a Chinese-American advocacy group
in lower Manhattan (which opposes a nearby neigh-
borhood jail), Bialosky has concluded that a revamped
Rikers would be far superior to four high-rise jails
because the “campus” model for jails, just as it is for
schools, is far superior to the “tower” model (Figure
3). He has drawn up a preliminary sketch (Figure 1)
to illustrate the possibilities for Rikers as well. In fact,
the jails and prisons that city officials visited as models
for New York’s borough-based plans are campus-style
jails, not high-rises.34
Examples of successful, modern, low- to mid-rise jails,
by contrast, include the Van Cise–Simonet Detention
Center in Denver (completed in 2010) and San Diego’s
Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Reentry Facility
(completed in 2014).
At Van Cise (Figure 4), inmates stay in dormitory-style
housing that features natural lighting and spontaneous
recreation opportunities.35 Inmates can walk to
decentralized medical clinics as well as therapeutic and
recreational activities.
At Las Colinas (Figure 5), separate facilities house
different functions, from sleeping to eating to
recreation and education, with inmates getting outdoor
exercise as guards escort them among facilities. The
jail’s architects and designers paid attention to light
and acoustics to create an environment to soothe, not
agitate, detained individuals.36
Yet both these facilities are low-rise; the taller of the
two, Van Cise, is five storeys.
For safety, new jails on Rikers would also offer better
options than high-rise towers in dense urban neighbor-
hoods, such as a need for evacuation to secure refuge
points in the case of fire or other danger. Similarly, vis-
itors to new jails would have ample room and time to
go through well-staffed security entrances equipped
with modern contraband-detection machines. As for
fairness: new jails could offer far more natural outdoor
space for recreation and therapy, including farming and
animal husbandry, than can indoor high-rise spaces.
Finally, though the city’s goal to reduce its inmate pop-
ulation is noble, it could rebuild a new Rikers Island
FIGURE 3.

Tower vs. Campus Jail Design: Outdoor Space

Tower
Each outdoor space is estimated to be at
the minimum allowed 1,000 SF. These “out-
door” spaces are not open to the sky and are
enclosed by solid walls on all sides with the
exception of 1/2 of one wall.
Inspired by statutory minimums.
Campus
Outdoor space includes grassy fields, wide-
open spaces, walking paths, amphitheater,
and a central quad.
Inspired by higher-education campus design.

Source: Lin Sing Association

FIGURE 4.

Van Cise–Simonet Detention Center, Denver

Photo: Courtesy of the Sheriff Department, City and County of Denver

11
 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan
FIGURE 5.
Las Colinas Women’s Detention and Reentry Facility, San Diego
Credit: Lawrence Anderson Photography, Courtesy of HMC Architects
with extra capacity, ensuring that new jails are not
overcrowded and not harming inmates’ quality of life
and public-health outlook.
A Reimagined Rikers:
Financial Benefits
Rebuilding Rikers Island could achieve significant cost
savings compared with building four separate new jails.
Material and labor costs will be the same. However,
the city could save on the logistical costs of setting up
four separate construction sites in four separate dense
urban neighborhoods—which makes everything from
pouring concrete to accepting delivery of rebar more
difficult.37 These overhead costs generally constitute
20% of a large project, or nearly $2 billion; saving
20% on this portion of the project, in turn, would yield
savings of over $300 million. Moreover, in building on
Rikers, the city would have more deadline flexibility. It
could simply transfer inmates from an older facility to
a newer one as each building opens, without having to
scramble to meet the current drop-dead symbolic goal
of closing Rikers.
In addition, eventually, the city could sell the Man-
hattan and Brooklyn jail sites to developers for mid-
12
rise market-rate housing, earning a profit that it could
invest in a rebuilt Rikers. The Queens and Bronx sites
are good candidates for below-market, working-class
and middle-class housing, though such projects would
likely require subsidy. In fact, the city had once con-
sidered the Bronx site for such “affordable” housing.38
A Reimagined Rikers:
What About the
Drawbacks?
Rebuilding Rikers requires upgrading the inadequate
transportation services for visitors. It also requires
environmental remediation. Neither hurdle is insur-
mountable—and the city must address them, anyway,
in whatever it decides to build at Rikers when it no
longer uses the island for jails.
There are two ways to solve the current challenges
faced by visitors to Rikers. First, to supplement the
MTA bus, which provides service from Queens every
12 minutes,39 the city can provide more frequent free
shuttle service from Harlem and Brooklyn, increasing
the service from its current 45–60-minute waits.40 The
existing bus service to Rikers costs the city $1.6 million
 FIGURE 6.
Adding a Ferry from Rikers to Lower Manhattan Court Facilities
Source: Lin Sing Association
annually; expanding this service would be a negligible
expense, compared with building four borough jails.41
More ambitiously, the city could integrate Rikers
Island into its five-borough fast-ferry system. As archi-
tect Bialosky points out, ferries to Rikers from Astoria
in Queens and Soundview in the Bronx would provide
far faster access than does current mass transporta-
tion. The city currently spends $60 million annually
to subsidize its existing six-route ferry system; adding
a limited route to Rikers likely would cost in the low
tens of millions of dollars annually, including the cost
of debt on the initial construction of a pier.42
Ferries could also provide the city with a better way
to transport inmates to and from Manhattan Crim-
inal Court (Figure 6). A ferry from Rikers to lower
Manhattan court facilities could “transport detainees
to their court appearance[s],” says Bialosky, “without
leaving the security of the bus.” He adds that it might
save “52 minutes one way.” Similar ferry service to
Rikers from Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx could cut
inmate-commute trips, as well.
Further, as the city remakes its street space to provide
priority access to MTA buses, it can integrate buses to
and from Rikers in bus-only lanes along major thor-
oughfares across the boroughs.
A ferry can transport detainees to their
court appearance at Manhattan Criminal
Court without leaving the security of the
bus and potentially save a maximum of
52 minutes one way.
The second major hurdle that the city faces in reimag-
ining Rikers is environmental remediation. Rikers is
built on landfill, which emits noxious methane gas.43
The island also requires flood protection. The city has
never comprehensively cataloged Rikers’ environmen-
tal challenges, or estimated the cost required to address
them. Yet environmental remediation and flood protec-
tion are likely prerequisites for many other future uses
of Rikers Island and, here again, the costs are likely less
than those associated with borough-based jails.
Conclusion
New York’s four-borough jails plan would require
significant taxpayer investment and government
competence to execute on time and on budget.
Yet executing this plan exactly as laid out may not
even pay off, in terms of helping the city achieve its
goals of smaller, safer, and fairer jails. There is no
guarantee that smaller jails in Brooklyn, the Bronx,
Manhattan, and Queens, built in constricted high-
rise environments, can successfully provide ample
outdoor space or ample therapeutic space. There is
no guarantee that high-rise jails can provide visitors
with a better, faster experience in overcoming
transportation and security hurdles. Should the
jails ever exceed their 3,300-inmate capacity on a
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 Reimagining Rikers Island: A Better Alternative to NYC’s Four-Borough Jail Plan
sustained basis, overcrowding would make it even
harder to achieve the goals of safety and fairness.
No one disputes that the existing Rikers facilities need
razing. Before awarding multibillion-dollar design-
and-build contracts that put the city on a path of no
return, though, the mayor and city council should halt
this process. It is not too late. The city’s Department of
Design and Construction does not anticipate awarding
a contract for the first two jails, in Manhattan and the
Bronx, until September and November 2021, respec-
tively.44 The city should use this time to invite archi-
tects and developers to propose their own visions of
what a reimagined Rikers could look like.
14
Opening these new jails would, in turn, allow the city to
achieve another stated aim: the closure of all existing,
obsolete jails on Rikers Island. Rikers, for more than
eight decades the site of most of the city’s incarcera-
tion facilities, is now shorthand for failure. “Obviously,
we’re going to get off Rikers Island,” the mayor said
last year, in response to the news that an inmate there
had attempted to hang himself. “We get out of Rikers,
and we get into the kind of facilities that are modern.”45
But why not stay on Rikers, and accomplish the same
goal, transforming Rikers from failure to success?
Endnotes
1 City of New York, A Roadmap to Closing Rikers, NYC Borough-Based Jail System.
2 NYC, Criminal Justice, “Smaller Safer Fairer: The Jail Population in NYC,” November/December 2019.
3 Michael Schwirtz, “Inmate’s Death in Overheated Rikers Cell Is Ruled Accidental,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 2014.
4 Craig McCarthy, “Coronavirus in NY: City to Release 23 More Inmates amid Jail System Outbreak,” New York Post, Mar. 22, 2020; Chelsia Rose Marcius,
“Hundreds Sprung: City Inmates Freed as Bug Keeps Spreading,” New York Daily News, Apr. 3, 2020.
5 Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, “A More Just New York City,” October 2019.
6 New York City Board of Correction, “Serious Injury Reports in NYC Jails: January 2019.”
7 New York City, “Council Votes on Historic Legislation to Close Rikers Island,” Oct. 17, 2019.
8 New York City, Department of Design and Construction, “Request for Qualifications: Detention Facilities, NYC Borough-Based Jails Program” (obtained
from NYC; the pdf is not online, but available from the author).
9 New York City, Department of Design and Construction, “City Issues Request for Qualifications for Design and Construction of Four New Borough-Based
Jails,” Feb. 4, 2020.
10 City of New York, Office of the Mayor, “Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Releases Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2020,” Apr. 25, 2019.
11 City of New York, Preliminary Budget Fiscal Year 2020, Financial Plan Summary, January 2019.
12 City of New York, Executive Budget Fiscal Year 2020, Budget Summary, April 2019.
13 City of New York, Office of the Mayor, “Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Releases Executive Budget for Fiscal Year 2020,” Apr. 25, 2019.
14 Jim Dwyer, “De Blasio Postpones Work on Crucial Water Tunnel,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 2016.
15 Metropolitan Transportation Authority, East Side Access Project.
16 David M. Levitt, “World Trade Center Project Cost to Be at Lower End of Estimate,” bloomberg.com, Feb. 19, 2016.
17 NYC, “Request for Qualifications, Detention Facilities.”
18 Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech, “End Is in Sight for Long-Awaited Hunters Point Library Project in Long Island City,” qns.com, Oct. 10, 2018; Caroline
Spivack, “Hunters Point Library Hit with Lawsuit over Accessibility Issues,” Curbed New York, Jan. 13, 2020.
19 “Mott Haven Leaders Sue NYC over Controversial Bronx Jail Plan: Lawsuit Accuses de Blasio Administration of Conducting Illegal Land-Use Process to
Advance Political Agenda,” readmedia.com, June 4, 2019; Maya Kaufman, “Queens Homeowners to Sue City over Kew Gardens Jail Plan,” patch.com,
Feb. 12, 2020.
20 NYC, “Smaller Safer Fairer.”
21 Rich Calder, “Proposed New Jails Slash Height in Bid to Win City Council Support,” New York Post, Oct. 15, 2019.
22 Independent Commission, “A More Just New York City.”
23 NYC, “Smaller Safer Fairer.”
24 New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, Average Daily Jail Population in NYC.
25 NYC, “Smaller Safer Fairer.”
26 McCarthy, “Coronavirus in NY”; Julia Marsh and Rebecca Rosenberg, “NYC Judge Frees Alleged Murderer over Concern He’ll Catch Coronavirus,”
New York Post, Mar. 27, 2020.
27 New York City, Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, “Jail: Who Is in on Bail?” May 2019, and Craig McCarthy, Ruth Weissman, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon,
“Dozens of NYC Inmates Back in Jail After Corona Virus Release,” New York Post, Apr. 20, 2020.
28 New York City Zoning, Zoning Application Portal, Rikers Island Public Placing Mapping.
29 Jan Ransom and Alan Feuer, “ ‘We’re Left for Dead’: Fears of Virus Catastrophe at Rikers Jail,” New York Times, Mar. 30, 2020.
30 New York City, Department of Correction, Population Demographics, FY2019 Quarter 1.
31 DATA2GO.NYC, Incarceration Rate (per 100,000 Adults) by Community District.
32 Ibid.

33 Chelsia Rose Marcius, “Coronavirus Prompts Reopening of Shuttered Jail on Rikers Island,” New York Daily News, Mar. 23, 2020.
34 Henrik Pryser Libell and Matthew Haag, “New York’s Jails Are Failing. Is the Answer 3,600 Miles Away?” New York Times, Nov. 13, 2019.
35 Bruce Omtvedt, “Denver Returns Corrections to Downtown,” correctionalnews.com, Dec. 1, 2010.
36 James Krueger and John A. MacAllister, “How to Design a Prison That Actually Comforts and Rehabilitates Inmates,” Fast Company, Apr. 3, 2015.
37 Conversation with two construction-industry insiders.
38 Bronx Tow Pound, urbanquotient.com.
39 MTA Bus Company, Bus Timetable Between Long Island City and Rikers Island, Effective Spring 2019.
40 Rikers Visit Bus Departure Times.
41 Dean Meminger, “A Ride on NYC’s New Free Bus Service to Rikers Island,” NY1, Apr. 25, 2018.
42 Sean Campion, “Swimming in Subsidies: The High Cost of NYC Ferry,” Citizens Budget Commission, March 2019.
43 Chelsia Rose Marcius, “Plan to Develop Rikers Island After Jails Close Could Hit Snag Thanks to Methane Gas,” New York Daily News, Dec. 23, 2019.
44 New York City Department of Design and Construction, “Request for Qualifications, Detention Facilities,” Winter 2020.
45 City of New York, “Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on the Brian Lehrer Show,” Dec. 6, 2019.

15
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